VA - Freshman daughter, mom 'good time drop off' outrages VA university

[Elley Mae]

- It’s countless fraternity chapters that still think it’s OK to chant, “No means yes, yes means anal.”

- It’s one in three college males admitting that they would commit rape if they knew it wouldn’t come back to haunt them.

- It’s universities expelling students for cheating but not for raping.

- Six percent of college males are rapists. They live, study, work and party among us. In our own words and actions, we must destroy any notion that rape is anything less than a heinous crime. It is not funny. It is not the victim’s fault. It is a big deal.

^ Seeing these in a list like this is sobering. I would hope most parents dropping off their daughters know these statistics and have prepped and planned and discussed it with them so by the time you're dropping her off at school the banners should be a reminder (a sad, infuriating reminder) of just how unsafe a university campus can be. But also knowing those stats and knowing the facts behind the "joke" of the banners is what makes me the most livid.

bbm

Nearly one in three college men admit they might rape a woman if they knew no one would find out and they wouldn’t face any consequences, according to a new study conducted by researchers at the University of North Dakota.

But, when the researchers actually used the word “rape” in their question, those numbers dropped much lower — suggesting that many college men don’t associate the act of forcing a woman to have sex with them with the crime of committing rape.

According to the survey, which analyzed responses from 73 men in college, 31.7 percent of participants said they would act on “intentions to force a woman to sexual intercourse” if they were confident they could get away with it. When asked whether they would act on “intentions to rape a woman” with the same assurances they wouldn’t face consequences, just 13.6 percent of participants agreed.

http://thinkprogress.org/health/2015/01/11/3610327/college-men-forcible-sex-study/

 

[bluesneakers]

Do you see something I don't? I don't see any links to any studies. Saying something is a fact without providing any links to support the claim doesn't make it so.

I was responding to something else, which is why I edited my comment. My mistake.

 

[Elley Mae]

Does everyone see that a word was changed? Might got changed to would. Wonder were that took place. :thinking:

 

[katydid23]

An editorial in ODU's student newspaper:


http://www.maceandcrown.com/2015/08/31/rape-culture-on-odu-campus/

[One in six women will experience sexual assault in her life.]

But that statistic includes things like ' someone rubbing against you with clothing on, or unwanted kissing' as examples of sexual assault. Heck, if a girl danced at a party she would fall under that definition as a victim of sexual assault.
The statistic of a woman being the victim of a rape is much lower than the 1 in 6 offered in this article.
http://www.slate.com/articles/doubl...ult_is_a_serious_problem_but_the_efforts.html


[Between one in four and One in five women that attend college will experience sexual assault.]

Not according to the articles I have seen. It seems that is a very questionable statistic.

"The Sexual Victimization of College Women, a 2000 study commissioned by the U.S. Department of Justice, is the basis for another widely cited statistic, even grimmer than the finding of CSA: that one in four college women will be raped. (An activist organization, One in Four, takes its name from the finding.) The study itself, however, found a completed rape rate among its respondents of 1.7 percent. How does a study that finds less than 2 percent of college women in a given year are raped become a 25 percent likelihood? In addition to the 1.7 percent of victims of completed rape, the survey found that another 1.1 percent experienced attempted rape. As the authors wrote, “[O]ne might conclude that the risk of rape victimization for college women is not high; ‘only’ about 1 in 36 college women (2.8 percent) experience a completed rape or attempted rape in an academic year.”
In a footnote, the authors acknowledge that asserting that one-quarter of college students “might” be raped is not based on actual evidence: “These projections are suggestive. To assess accurately the victimization risk for women throughout a college career, longitudinal research following a cohort of female students across time is needed.”


[It’s estimated that less than five percent of university-related sexual assaults are reported]


from link above:

"No one disputes that only a percentage of sexual assaults get reported, but the studies that have tried to capture the incidence of unreported rape are miles apart. As Christopher Krebs observed, “Some [surveys] I think create high numbers that are difficult to defend. Some create artificially low numbers that are impossible to defend.” We do have hard numbers on actual reports of sexual assault on campus thanks to the Clery Act, the federal law that requires colleges to report their crime rates. But even these figures are controversial.
Reported sexual assaults have been rising on campus in recent years, at a time when other campus crime is declining. (The nation as a whole has experienced a dramatic drop in all violent crime over the past few decades, including sexual assault, which is down more than 60 percent since 1995.) The rise of reporting on campus sexual assault is generally described by security experts as a function of a greater willingness on the part of women to make complaints, not an increase in incidence. Despite reports of “soaring” sexual assault rates on campus, the raw numbers remain low. At the University of Chicago, the jump from 2011 to 2013 was 83 percent: an increase from six reports to 11, which represents 0.4 percent of the university’s undergraduate women. Carnegie Mellon went up 220 percent, from five cases to 16, or 0.6 percent of the university’s undergraduate women. President Obama has asserted that only about 12 percent of sexual assault victims make a report to authorities. If he is correct, and we extrapolate from the Clery numbers, that would suggest there were 32,500 assaults in 2012, reported and not, or a 0.27 percent incidence.

 

[bluesneakers]

More shades of Cosby and Duggar, being harassed and assaulted is the new (old) norm:

For Young Women, Sexual Violence Is The New Normal

Most young women assume that being harassed, assaulted, and abused is simply something that everyone experiences, according to the results from a forthcoming study[1] that will be published in the next issue of the journal Gender & Society. The perception that gender-based violence is normal dissuades most victims[2] from reporting those crimes.

In other words, these young women tend to believe that men can’t help it. They’ve been taught that men can’t control their aggressive sex drives, so it makes sense to them that girls will inevitably become the subject of that aggression. That’s a central aspect of rape culture, and Hlavka argues it’s been deeply socialized into young women. Most of the study participants didn’t understand that there was any other way for men and women to interact.

1. From Marquette
Normalizing Sexual Violence
Young Women Account for Harassment and Abuse

2. Sociologists for Women in Society
Girls View Sexual Violence as Normal

 

[katydid23]

From the Slate timely article:

We also need to change the culture of discourse around sexual assault on campuses. To stand up for the rights of the accused is not to attack victims or women. Our colleges, like the rest of our society, must be places where you are innocent until proven guilty. The day after graduation, young men and women will be thrown into a world where there is no Gender-Based Misconduct Office. They will have to live by the rules of society at large. Higher education should ready our students for this reality, not shield them from it.

http://www.slate.com/articles/doubl...ult_is_a_serious_problem_but_the_efforts.html

 

[katydid23]

Tomatoes may now be thrown:

‘THE RAPE EPIDEMIC ON CAMPUS DOES NOT EXIST’

EDITOR MARCH 16, 2015

http://www.mindingthecampus.org/2015/03/the-rape-epidemic-on-campus-does-not-exist/

HEATHER MAC DONALD: Let’s look at these numbers, Howard. The most common statistic thrown out these days by President Obama, Vice President Biden, on down is that one in five women will be the victims of sexual assault during their college careers.

Detroit is America’s most violent city. Its violent crime rate for all four violent felonies—that’s rape, murder, aggravated assault, and robbery—is 2%. Its rape rate is 0.05%. A 20% crime rate for any crime, much less one as serious as rape, is virtually unheard of. Not even in Africa’s most brutal civil wars has anything been experienced in human history like a 20% crime rate. And yet despite a rape rate that is allegedly 400 times that of Detroit’s, sophisticated, highly educated baby boomer mothers are beating down the doors of campuses to try to get their daughters in.

and:

Essentially what the universities have done in creating this designation in the codes of sexual misconduct is to throw out the insights of all of rape law and come up with a kind of new, extremely pro-victim definition of culpable conduct.

At the heart of this, to the extent one can discern what actually counts as sexual misconduct, at the core of it is that the woman is somehow coerced or she doesn’t consent. Well, the bottom line is this all has to do with what’s in the woman’s mind and how she feels. It’s purely a subjective standard.

Now in the law it’s also a subjective standard, but almost every jurisdiction has created a counterweight to that, which is the so-called guilty mind requirement for the accused, the mens rea requirement, and it goes something like this: if she can prove that she didn’t consent, technically there’s been sexual assault, but the accused always has the opportunity to come forward and show that he reasonably believed that she consented because there were no objective indicia from which a reasonable person could infer that she didn’t want to do it. So this gives the accused an enormously important safeguard of objectivity in order to be let off the hook.

Well, our campus code has no explicit mens rea defense. It’s purely a strict liability code, and one in which a woman could effectively sit there and say to herself, “I don’t want to do it,” without ever having to communicate it in any objective way, and that creates an enormous trap for the unwary. So I am just giving you a demonstration of how campuses have, in effect, felt free to change the entire playing field for what constitutes sexual misconduct.

 

[katydid23]

This right here is exactly how I feel about what educators are doing to young ladies today:

It is a very, very odd moment on campuses today because you have females on the one hand asserting their right for maximum promiscuity, and also asserting their right to reimport selective portions of the Victorian ethos that portrays them as completely helpless, and it’s up to the males to protect them.

YESSSSSSS to the above description. That is exactly what has gotten my goat in this thread even.



also:
Amy mentioned that the affirmative consent standard, affirmative consent is so Victorian that it portrays females as incapable of even saying no. What affirmative consent is replacing is the idea that no means no. Now we’re saying females should not even be expected to say no.

The male needs to see a constant demonstration of affirmative consent. What does that consist of? Well, in California there is a very widespread sexual code that’s present at Occidental, Claremont McKenna, and you can negate—and again this gets to Amy’s discussion of the traditional, common law, careful evolution of rape law, and what we’re replacing it with. Now the female can negate consent by simply showing confusion and ambivalence.

http://www.mindingthecampus.org/2015/03/the-rape-epidemic-on-campus-does-not-exist/


I have to wonder whatever happened to good old accountability and responsibility? If we tell our girls they shouldn't wear booty shorts and drink straight out of the tequila bottle at a party then we are 'shaming them' if they are taken advantage of that night.

 

[katydid23]

I guess that no one wants to discuss the veracity of the statistics used to affirm the 'rape culture' thesis. But here is another article that calls the ' 1 in 5' stat into question:

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/n...een-raped-on-college-campuses/article/2551980

The CSA study was actually an online survey that took 15 minutes to complete, and the 5,446 undergraduate women who participated were provided a $10 Amazon gift card. Men participated too, but their answers weren’t included in the one-in-five statistic.

If 5,446 sounds like a high number, it’s not — the researchers acknowledged that it was actually a low response rate.

“Another limitation of the CSA study, inherent with Web-based survey, is that the response rates were relatively low,” the researchers said. “Although the response rates were not lower than what most Web-based surveys achieve, they are lower than what we typically achieve using a different mode of data collection (e.g. face-to-face interviewing).”

The truth is, we don't know how many women have been sexually assaulted on America's college campuses, but legislation based on overblown statistics won't lead to safer campuses, just more fear.

 

[katydid23]

Is anyone going to back up the 1 in 5 statistic and tell us why the criticism of the 'study' is incorrect. It is used here quite often and taken as gospel. I have posted a few articles which call it into question. Am I incorrect in questioning it's credibility?

 

[Fairy1]

Honestly, I don't know that any statistics on rape and sexual abuse in general are really accurate. We do know that rape is one of the most underreported crimes, for many reasons.

My personal issue with the banners about which this thread was started is that anyone that laughs it off and makes light of it perpetuates the old "boys will be boys" BS. That type of thinking is just as huge a disservice to males as it is to females. It sends the message that our expectations of "boys" are low. That we know they just can't help it or control themselves. It gives them a pass to behave badly.

It's no different than the type of thinking folks like the Duggars subscribe to - that females are responsible for the behaviors of the males, who can't possibly be expected to control their urges around the opposite sex. Same with the draconian dress codes in schools all across this country. Girls showing their shoulders or knees? How can boys possibly concentrate on their studies with all that slutty temptation going on? How long before all they can wear are nun habits or burkas? GMAFB.

 

[katydid23]

Honestly, I don't know that any statistics on rape and sexual abuse in general are really accurate. We do know that rape is one of the most underreported crimes, for many reasons.

My personal issue with the banners about which this thread was started is that anyone that laughs it off and makes light of it perpetuates the old "boys will be boys" BS. That type of thinking is just as huge a disservice to males as it is to females. It sends the message that our expectations of "boys" are low. That we know they just can't help it or control themselves. It gives them a pass to behave badly.

It's no different than the type of thinking folks like the Duggars subscribe to - that females are responsible for the behaviors of the males, who can't possibly be expected to control their urges around the opposite sex. Same with the draconian dress codes in schools all across this country. Girls showing their shoulders or knees? How can boys possibly concentrate on their studies with all that slutty temptation going on? How long before all they can wear are nun habits or burkas? GMAFB.

I agree. But I think we also have the opposite thing going on with our girls. We tend to 'sexualize' them at a very young age. I found myself buying hot pink animal print leggings for my girl when she was 4. I thought it was adorable to dress her like a mini me. But I think overall that we are teaching our girls to be 'playahs' like the boys aspire to be. We want them to have the same sexual freedoms the boys have , to be free from being judged. We have a full on HOOK UP mentality going on in colleges now but the problem is that girls feel regret/shame/fear afterwards. And it gets messy. JMO

 

[flourish]

It's all poor taste, IMO.
Not that college kids, male and female, are known for their highly-tuned powers of discernment.
I believe there's behaviors and attitudes which are conducive to or promote or encourage an environment where disrespect towards a particular population occurs.

While I find the banners offensive and gross, I don't necessarily agree that they are promoting rape, just lots of free lovin'. They say there's a time and place for everything, and that place is college.

As for the argument, or insinuation, that since this was a PRIVATE residence, then the college can't touch them, I call shenanigans. Most universities have codes of conduct, and lots of those schools specify that students are expected to act in accordance with the code of conduct regardless of location. I expect fraternities may have something similar, as well as partnerships with the schools. It's not like the frats and universities are separate entities.

Finally, I asked Mr flourish how he would likely react if he saw those banners on his way taking his daughter to college. He said teachable moment. One would hope parents would take advantage of the opportunity. Of course, he also said he would ask daughter what she thought of the banners, and if she said anything like, "oh! My homie Josh is pledging that frat!" he'd turn the car around. Lol.


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I can agree with that perspective and point, as yes, women are historically and realistically the victims of the behaviors and acts that are frequently associated with the attitudes shown.

However, I don't think either banner is less sexist than the other, simply because of the authors. They are both sexist, IMO.


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That doesn't make it okay. Or true. I'm a woman. I have a dozen or so nieces and grand-nieces. I'm more familiar with rape than I'd prefer. So are the males in my life who have been the victims of sexual abuse. Because males aren't immune to sexual abuse, assault, harassment, rape, or sexism.

Edited because I forgot a word.
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I hope we can all agree that teaching children of all genders self-awareness techniques, social skills, self-control, respect for others and their needs as well as recognizing and assertively advocating for their own needs is an awesome thing to do.


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I don't feel like typing again but wanted to sorta summarize my posts, I guess.


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[Fairy1]

I agree. But I think we also have the opposite thing going on with our girls. We tend to 'sexualize' them at a very young age. I found myself buying hot pink animal print leggings for my girl when she was 4. I thought it was adorable to dress her like a mini me. But I think overall that we are teaching our girls to be 'playahs' like the boys aspire to be. We want them to have the same sexual freedoms the boys have , to be free from being judged. We have a full on HOOK UP mentality going on in colleges now but the problem is that girls feel regret/shame/fear afterwards. And it gets messy. JMO

I agree and while I do believe that women should be allowed to explore their own sexuality without judgement or shaming, I think a little self-respect goes a long way, too.

All you have to do is look at what their celebrity role models are doing to see why they think they're doing it right. Just check out the array of getups so many of those women were wearing at the VMA's last night. What a confusing message that must be for young, impressionable women.

 

[sorrell skye]

From the Slate timely article:

We also need to change the culture of discourse around sexual assault on campuses. To stand up for the rights of the accused is not to attack victims or women. Our colleges, like the rest of our society, must be places where you are innocent until proven guilty. The day after graduation, young men and women will be thrown into a world where there is no Gender-Based Misconduct Office. They will have to live by the rules of society at large. Higher education should ready our students for this reality, not shield them from it.

http://www.slate.com/articles/doubl...ult_is_a_serious_problem_but_the_efforts.html

Yes - after graduation, young men & women will be faced with working in the adult world. While there will be no Gender-Based Misconduct Office, there WILL be a Human Resources Department that WILL inform them of the sexual harassment policy in their employment packet.

I totally agree that higher education should prepare young men & women for the reality they face as working adults. This should include educating them (at the very least) regarding the definition of sexual harassment in the workplace.

Regarding sexual assault: If a young person hasn't learned the definition of rape by the time they graduate college and has entered the adult working world, I'm afraid there's no hope for that person.

 

[al66pine]

I agree and while I do believe that women should be allowed to explore their own sexuality without judgement or shaming, I think a little self-respect goes a long way, too.

All you have to do is look at what their celebrity role models are doing to see why they think they're doing it right. Just check out the array of getups so many of those women were wearing at the VMA's last night. What a confusing message that must be for young, impressionable women.

Who says 'celebrities' are 'role models'?
Imo, very few are.

Parents should be role models for their children, jmo.

 

[LinasK]

I agree. But I think we also have the opposite thing going on with our girls. We tend to 'sexualize' them at a very young age. I found myself buying hot pink animal print leggings for my girl when she was 4. I thought it was adorable to dress her like a mini me. But I think overall that we are teaching our girls to be 'playahs' like the boys aspire to be. We want them to have the same sexual freedoms the boys have , to be free from being judged. We have a full on HOOK UP mentality going on in colleges now but the problem is that girls feel regret/shame/fear afterwards. And it gets messy. JMO

BBM. I chose not to buy into that when my daughter was little.

 

[katydid23]

Yes - after graduation, young men & women will be faced with working in the adult world. While there will be no Gender-Based Misconduct Office, there WILL be a Human Resources Department that WILL inform them of the sexual harassment policy in their employment packet.

I totally agree that higher education should prepare young men & women for the reality they face as working adults. This should include educating them (at the very least) regarding the definition of sexual harassment in the workplace.

Regarding sexual assault: If a young person hasn't learned the definition of rape by the time they graduate college and has entered the adult working world, I'm afraid there's no hope for that person.

But the main problem is that the "University's definition of rape' is not the same as the regular criminal code. In regular life, you don't need to consent every 20 seconds, like the college code now requires.

 

[Ray_of_hope]

Please just get rid of frats already.

Two together and IQ's halve, 3 and IQ's drop by a third and so on... Yes, get rid of them!

 

[Fairy1]

Who says 'celebrities' are 'role models'?
Imo, very few are.

Parents should be role models for their children, jmo.

Totally agree, but that's not always the case. And let's be honest, some parents aren't good role models either.